Don’t put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family’s life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn’t move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.
ARTHUR HAILEY
Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts–including my own–where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it.
SARAH WATERS
Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.
JOHN McPHEE
The writer’s intention hasn’t anything to do with what he achieves. The intent to earn money or the intent to be famous or the intent to be great doesn’t matter in the end. Just what comes out.
LILLIAN HELLMAN
My first advice to an aspiring writer is to talk yourself out of it if you can possibly do it, because you'll probably fail and make yourself miserable doing it. I feel about myself that I'm anomalous—a rare combination of fear, an affection for language, a reverence for literature, doggedness, and good luck. Plus, I married the right girl.
RICHARD FORD
Writer’s block is a temporary paralysis caused by the conviction, on an unconscious level, that what the writer is attempting is in some way fraudulent, or mistaken, or self-destructive.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
EDNA FERBER
The smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls.
GEORGE PLIMPTON
If you spontaneously come up with funny things—and I mean writing funny things, not just saying them—and if other people seem to like them, then consider humor writing. Also, don’t kill anyone. When people see “murderer,” they automatically think it’s probably not funny. That’s just the way people are.
JACK HANDEY
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason – if the words are in any way blurred – the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing “weak specification.”
RAYMOND CARVER
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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